Spring Round-Up: Writing as Opposed to Recommending - Page 6

The "surprise" of the plot is pointless. It doesn't matter whether the stranger is "real" or just a schizzy projection of the writer's, because it comes to the same thing interpretively. It's a battle between the chaotic impulses of the unhappy man who fantasizes murderous stories and the constructive impulses of the writer who contains them in his craft. Even if there are two men, they represent two sides of the writer, and even if there's only one it's an allegorical battle between an evil and a good knight.

What does make a difference, however, is the casting. Turturro is his usual overdeliberate self, every expression superglued to the screen, but he is at least imposing. But whose idea was it to cast Depp as a man so full of sexual anger he kills his own dog (whether actually or symbolically) after his ex-wife speaks of it affectionately? Balled up in a torn bathrobe with messy grown-out dye-job hair, Depp looks like a pouty teenager. The movie actually uses this junior quality for its most memorable moments, when Depp's pain turns into comedy in the scene at the insurance company in which the writer accuses his ex-wife's fiance of "rubbernecking." But a spark-throwing bundle of sexual rage Depp is not, and for the movie to cohere we have to be able to see why it works for this man to have the killer take over the controls from the writer rather than the reverse.

Not that there's any other youngish American actor right now who would be right for the part. (And to be fair to Depp, Humphrey Bogart wasn't better as a wife-killer coming undone in Conflict (1945).) Our actors don't have that kind of masculine sexual aggression anymore, the way Clark Gable and Robert Mitchum once did (when women were less self-conscious about the rough romance of being taken). It is a loss, lopping off one end of the spectrum of our public fantasies. Of course, gay men indulge these fantasies in the rawer forms of porno, and straight women indulge them in soap operas and romance novels, but it's something else to experience them in a less functionally constricted piece of entertainment and incarnated by someone with a more expansive talent.

Certain commonwealth actors have come closer. The new Irish movie Intermission, for instance, begins with Colin Farrell apparently flirting with the countergirl in a coffee house; what he's actually doing, however, is beguiling her so she won't see his fist coming. He's a smash-and-grab petty thief with the gift of gab and you know you'd fall for it just like that poor girl did (at the frightening intersection of fantasy and reality). Especially when you see him run from the cops and in his flight grab up a workman's shovel, flip it through the air to his other hand, and then leap on the hood of a woman's car and demand she let him have it.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

Visit Alan Dale's author page — Alan Dale's Blog